Season Justice With Mercy, Set Jean Harris Free

June 27, 1986|By James Kilpatrick, Universal Press Syndicate

WASHINGTON — Some time within the next few days, Jean Harris will post a letter to New York's Gov. Mario Cuomo. Please, she will be saying, please have mercy. She will ask for the clemency that only a governor can grant. Her plea should be heard.

Perhaps you have forgotten the case of Jean Harris. Six years ago it was the stuff from which the tabloid papers are made. But suppose we go back a little further, to December 1966. That was when Jean Harris met Dr. Herman ''Hi'' Tarnower. She was then 43, divorced, mother of two sons, a native of Grosse Pointe, Mich., a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Smith. She had been a schoolteacher for 19 years; she had just been named director of a girls' academy in the Philadelphia suburb of Chestnut Hill.

Shana Alexander, in Very Much a Lady, has described Harris at that time. She was ''a bright, very pretty, provincial schoolteacher and divorcee, highly educated, high-minded, and about as worldly as Winnie-the-Pooh.'' Just before Christmas 20 years ago she went to a dinner party at a friend's home on Park Avenue. One of the guests was ''a man who looked to her like an Egyptian pharaoh.'' This was Hi Tarnower: ''He was tall and dark, with olive skin, white teeth, prominent nose and ears, and hypnotic brown eyes flecked with amber lights.'' He was a cardiologist, unmarried, with a rich practice in Scarsdale. In 1978, with her help, he would produce the best-selling Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.

She fell headlong in love. In a matter of weeks she had become his mistress. For a time her love was as passionately returned. Her career blossomed. In 1976 she became headmistress of the posh Madeira School in Virginia just outside Washington. Their affair lasted for almost 14 years.

Toward the end of this period it became a one-sided affair. A notorious womanizer, Tarnower was not satisfied with one mistress. He needed two -- Lynne Tryforos, his receptionist and office assistant, on weeknights; Jean Harris on weekends and vacations. Harris submitted to this humiliating arrangement. She was infatuated, besotted, obsessed with love. The two women were well aware of his duplicity. He seems to have treated them with equal cruelty.

By March 1980 Harris was falling to pieces. Tarnower had kept her on Desoxyn, a stimulant known as ''speed,'' and she had become drug-dependent. He was favoring Tryforos, who was making it a practice to leave her lingerie in the bathroom where Harris could find it. Consumed by jealousy, she bombarded Tarnower with pathetic love letters.

In February 1980, in the midst of suicidal depression, Harris bought a .32-caliber revolver. On the evening of March 10 she wrote out her resignation from Madeira, wrote a will, left instructions for her funeral and drove mindlessly through the rain to Tarnower's home. At her trial she insisted that her only thought had been to have one last talk with her lover, and then to kill herself. Her testimony was that she put the gun to her temple; he wrested it away; in the ensuing scuffle she pulled the trigger repeatedly. Tarnower died of four bullet wounds.

Harris went on trial the following November. In February 1981, after eight days of deliberation, a jury found her guilty of first-degree murder. She was given the minimum sentence of 15 years to life, with parole a possibility in 1996.

Jean Harris was 63 years old in April. She has suffered two serious heart attacks in prison. Gov. Cuomo and his advisers might well ask themselves what possible public purpose is served by keeping her longer in prison. In correctional theory, prison sentences have several functions. We lock up convicted felons to punish them, to rehabilitate them, to incarcerate them, and to deter them and others from future crime. In the matter of Harris, none of these has meaning. She assuredly is no danger to society. She has been punished severely. The time has come, just as Portia pleaded in The Merchant of Venice, for justice to be seasoned with mercy.